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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23558218">Use Gun On Man: One Woman's Adventures in Denial and Podcasts.</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/takatakataka/pseuds/takatakataka'>takatakataka</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Action, Introspection, Profanity, Short One Shot</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 18:14:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,616</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23558218</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/takatakataka/pseuds/takatakataka</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Nomad has a real big-think for a bit while searching for a decent podcast and then gets shot.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Use Gun On Man: One Woman's Adventures in Denial and Podcasts.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Scorned Devils is still happening, I have excuses but ya'll don't need em. I'm not gonna give a firm date on when it'll come other than soon™. The last chapter Is literally 80% done at this point. Next time I'll write several chapters before posting the first one.  </p><p>Anyway, this came about while I was playing and I was just incredibly amused by the idea of Nomads experience being one to one with my own of the game. Something about the idea of a grizzled special forces officer listening to podcasts while wiping out bases in desperate fights for survival just seemed like a neat idea for a short little blurb. So there you go. It was written at 3 am when I decided to hard reset my sleep patterns and I don't care enough about it to properly review it, so any grammar and spelling issues will be noted but left alone. That's also probably why there's so much casual use of profanity.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Nomad was uncertain of how much longer this could go on, she could go on. Her time on Auroa had quickly become the most draining experience of her career, spending weeks at a time alone in the wilderness of the archipelago avoiding or killing the Islands forces. Her only social interactions being transactional things solely for the mission, most every civilian acted terrified of her even if she did want to just have a chat. </p><p>She didn’t want to talk to anyone more than she had too, of course, she’d realized everyone on this nightmare of an island was a hypocritical coward weeks ago. </p><p>A patrol of three Sentinel soldiers walking a dirt trail passed by her spot in the dense foliage of the forest, they were talking about someone named Hawkins and Grant being dead. Again. Whoever they were they must have been popular considering they’d been dead for at least a month now and it was still half of what any soldier talked about at any given time on this god damn island. In the time Nomad had been here she had killed...well, she’d killed a lot of other soldiers and it was just absurd at this point that these two shmucks would still be all anyone could focus on.</p><p>She pulled back the charging handle of her internally suppressed AR-15 about an inch or so, verifying a round of 5.56 was sitting patiently for its big moment on the bolt face. She pushed the charging handle forward again and tapped the forward assist to ensure the bullet was fully seated before slinking from the brush. The Patrol still had no idea she was there as she leveled the barrel of her rifle and fired the first burst into there backs. </p><p>The rearmost man dropped like a rock immediately, the second and third wheeled around at the metallic hissing and clattering of a suppressed rifle.  She passionlessly transitioned to the man farthest from her and fired again, another rapid set of <em> rap-rap-raps </em> came from the muzzle of her rifle as the recoil carried it upwards. The rounds traveled with the muzzle, striking the man in a vertical pattern to plant the first two in his chest and the third through his jaw. The middle man made the mistake of turning to check his partner, Nomad seized the moment. She charged him, tackling him to the ground with her knife drawn. They struggled in the mud a moment but ultimately it ended the same way it always did, with her stabbing a man to death repeatedly.  </p><p>She stepped away from her handiwork and set off into the woods on the other side of the path from where she had started. Really the killing was her source of concern. She’d killed before, of course, she was numb to that at this point. The thing was, she’d never killed <em> this many </em> people before. The closest would have been that cluster fuck of an op in Bolivia, but back then she had a team. The killing had been distributed amongst them and more importantly, they had each other to distract themselves from it all afterward. She remembered Bowman, their handler for that op, warning them that the cartel was different, sicker, unlike any kind of cruelties they’d seen before. </p><p>Bowman was almost comically wrong. The cartel wasn’t any worse than what they’d seen in the rest of their career, sick to be sure but nothing they hadn’t experienced before. And while Sentinel was pretty tame all things considered there was just something...different, about having to take on entire bases alone. </p><p>There was something life-changing about wiping out entire bases single-handedly, and certainly not for the better.   </p><p>PTSD wasn’t something Nomad was willing to think about at this point, she needed to get out of her head for a bit. She resorted to a newfound vice of hers in moments like these, podcasts. The reason this had become a vice was that she didn’t just listen to them in safety, she listened to them constantly in the field. She’d have some transgender socialists talking about engineering disasters through her expensive comms units in the middle of the most intense firefights. Horror narrators talked of impossible beasts as she skulked around Wolf bases in the dead of night. Middle-aged and drunken men from Wisconson shit talked terrible movies she’d never watched as she investigated the fates of her squad. It was a liability, but a comforting one she would go crazy without. </p><p>She reached into her pocket to retrieve her phone as she stepped out into yet another field of wildflowers, they were all over the place on this bizarrely picturesque neoliberal nightmare. She looked around the clearing and plugged the phones 3.5mm jack into her headset as she crouched down. The clearing was essentially just a sea of flowers surrounded on three sides by trees before opening out to a mountain to the north, the only thing to mar it being the burned-out wreck of an armored truck on its side. Confident she’d be safe for at least a few minutes she looked down and started scrolling through her downloaded list. She used the WI-FI at the many installations on the island to download them without drawing attention to herself in the wilderness, she was at least careful about that much. </p><p>Horror? No, not the right mood for it. Military? Strangely she’d lost interest in listening to others talk about her chosen profession since quadrupling her kill count. Deep analytical essays? Not a good choice if she got in a fight. Fat midwestern slobs summarizing and mocking B-Movies from the 80s and 90s? Fuck it, sure. </p><p>She pressed play just as a rifle round impacted the dirt to her right. </p><p>An exhausted panic filled her as she shoved the phone into her pocket and scrambled for the wreckage of the truck. Her mind scrambled to figure out what had happened as two men performed a comedic introductory conversation in her ear. She searched desperately before identifying two angry glowing red drones flying erratically in her direction, a flare about 20 meters from where she’d been told her what happened. An Azrael drone had spotted her. More gunfire came from the other side of the clearing, impacting the truck. The Wolves had arrived. </p><p>She maneuvered her rifle to her left shoulder in order to expose as little of herself as possible as she leaned around the trucks' blackened hood and fired a burst into the closest drone. A piece of spiky metal flew off the top of the thing but it was otherwise unfazed. Her second burst sent it sputtering a bit and her third, while only partially hitting it, sent the beast crashing into the flowers burning. She always thought it was bullshit how much damage those little flying bastards could take.  </p><p>The second drone didn’t go down so easily. Her first burst went wide, the drones reply did not. The Robots burst skidded off the top and side of her helmet jerking her head back violently and dazing her. She brought herself fully behind cover again and considered retreating to the woods again to gain more options. This thought was derailed when a Wolf rounded the back of the truck and fired his shotgun directly into her chest. She felt yet another ceramic plate of body armor crack and fragment under the force of a wad of buckshot at point-blank range that knocked her off balance. </p><p>As she fell backward, the middle-aged men in her ears lost their minds with laughter. </p><p>She managed to catch herself by grabbing the side of where the truck’s windshield used to be with her left hand. With her left arm being the only thing keeping her off the ground, she used her right to raise her rifle and fire at the man before he could cycle his weapons action. The recoil once again carried the three rounds of her burst up from the man’s gut and into his neck, causing him to fall to the ground in a gurgling heap. Nomad righted herself and moved to the other side of the truck to engage the Wolves’ partner, but as she aligned her sights on him another burst came from behind her. It was largely inaccurate and the majority of the shots impacted the dirt harmlessly but three managed to stitch up her side, ripping through her right shin and shoulder while the third flattened against the ceramic plate in the back of her vest.  She was seeing red as she wheeled around and fired several desperate bursts into the drone, mostly missing, with the last bringing it down. </p><p>Her arm gave out immediately from the weight of the rifle, she let it drop and be caught by the sling that kept it tethered to her. She drew the Beretta M9 from her leg holster and, with a stumbling step, rounded the rear of the truck and fired 5 wild shots at the other Wolf. Two went wide, two stuck him in the body armor, and the third managed to hit his poorly secured helmet in just such a way as to send it flying off his head with a loud ring while the round punched through his skull. She would have been amused if she wasn't critically wounded. A quick scan confirmed her hopes, that was all of them, for now. </p><p>Nomad about-faced and hurried back into the woods, stumbling and limping along the way. She had to get away from the flare, more would come, she needed to get away and heal up. She needed to rest. </p><p>And, perhaps most importantly, she needed to restart her podcast.      </p>
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